


If you are squeamish

by celestialskiff



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-17
Updated: 2011-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-27 11:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celestialskiff/pseuds/celestialskiff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>After a hundred years your head begins to fill up. You remember things—isolated events, a moment in a forgotten room—but sometimes you don't know the context or you couldn't name the protagonists.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	If you are squeamish

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for [Fall_for_SX](http://fall-for-sx.livejournal.com/) over on Livejournal.

**Wounded**

After a hundred years your head begins to fill up. You remember things—isolated events, a moment in a forgotten room—but sometimes you don't know the context or you couldn't name the protagonists. Spike remembers graveyards. He remembers a lot of graveyards and a lot of moonlight, and a woman with dark hair. Sometimes it's hard to remember that it's Dru he's remembering, and it makes him wonder if he will one day forget her name, too.

Sunnydale is gone now. Good. Gone. Gone for good. He remembers a certain slant of light falling from between the trees in front of his crypt, a perfect square patch of sunshine, imprisoning him. There are no trees now, and no crypt, and that's normal. There was a room once he lived in for years, a room with a sofa that smelt like horses and from which long horse hairs occasionally emerged and a dark carpet and a tablecloth with a rust stain in one corner. He remembers them so clearly but they must be gone, gone for at least ninety years now.

He bough the flat. No. He rented the flat. Did he rent the flat? Someone rented the flat, and now he's here, in Edinburgh. Edinburgh. There was a reason for going to Scotland, and he likes having a flat again. The radiators are covered in pink paint, thick and peeling at the edges, and he turns them all on and rests his hands on them, one after another, until his hands are as warm as a human's, and then he touches them to his forehead, to the tender flesh of his stomach, and it feels like being burnt.

Pieces. He buys blood now, stacks it neatly in his fridge. Pig's blood, sheep's blood—it's all equally disgusting. He opens the fridge and looks at the bags and looks out the window at the street lights and the tall brick buildings and the trees. It all falls away from him and then it coalesces somewhere in his brain, like finally seeing a pattern at the bottom of a kaleidoscope.

There's a phone number on the front of his fridge, a row of neat numbers and a name written above them. He has to read the name twice before he knows why the number is here, and then he picks up the phone, the little white cordless phone, and dials it.

Xander answers. “So, Scottish panthers. Is that a thing? Because I thought wolves were a thing, but apparently they're not.”

 **Empty**

He can smell the blood in Xander's eye socket. He can smell the progress of healing, the granulation of the blood cells. For a second an old memory rises in him: a wall in Coimbra. The smell of oranges and custard. Blue tiles, and aqueous humour on his fingers. Sticky. Dru hadn't liked the way that boy was looking at her.

The house was full of the scents of other humans, of the noises of girls and their heartbeats, the movement of their digestion. There are things you don't talk about to humans, because they are disgusted enough when they see you licking blood of your fingers. You don't tell them the way a virgin girl's womb tastes when you open and suck, you don't tell them the way you used to like sharing your bed with a half dead human for the warmth, and for the companionship of the screams. You show only a reflection of yourself, and think it is you, and learn to put with the cruelty they see mirrored there.

Xander's breaths are even. He's not in much pain, his pain has been dulled with drugs. He's lying on his back, the house heavy with the scent of humans around him, and dark, but there's a stillness too. They're keeping quiet. The house should be loud, but they're holding their noise in, like water in a pond seems still despite the fish darting beneath its surface.

Spike doesn't know what to do. He wants to lick the skin beneath Xander's empty socket. He wants to hold his head in his hands. He lies on the bed next to him, and Xander doesn't push him away. He curls up next to him, his muscles tense to keep his body away from Xander's, to stop himself from leaning too much of his weight on him.

He doesn't know what to do. He gathers himself, forcing the pieces of himself back into their box.

“Something happened to your face, eh?” Spike says.

“Yeah,” Xander says. “Something.”

“And now you're just lying in bed doing nothing? Lazy.”

“Give me a minute. Then I'll get up. Do some carpentry. Something around here always needs to be fixed.”

“Don't move when I'm so comfortable,” Spike replies, and slides a thin arm around Xander's torso. The boy doesn't stiffen. He lets him lie there, press himself against that human warmth.

“Where were you, anyway?”

For a second, Spike doesn't remember. He remembers a hotel in Bath, a room with a low ceiling and a floral carpet. He remembers how those roses looked when they were flecked with blood. Then he says, “Was on a mission.”

“Ah,” Xander says. He rests his hand on the small of Spike's back. “Hope your moves were as smooth as mine when I was on _my_ mission.”

 **Cairngorms**

Xander smells like somewhere else. He smells like pine trees and like mud, and like musty train seats that have been sat on too many times, and like coffee and that funny milk that comes in little plastic packets. Spike smells it all, is overwhelmed by these new scents, each so distinct, so much so that he almost can't place Xander. The room feels like it's the wrong shape, the edges of the corridor arguing with each other.

“You OK? If I were a vampire I'd still be standing out in the hall, but luckily I have no sense of decorum and pushed past you so now we're both inside.”

“You smell...” Spike begins, and then tries to push the words away because it's not at all how he wants to start this conversation.

“Like sweat, I know,” Xander said. “Why do they heat these trains so much? We're used to the cold now. Our bodies don't know how to cope with tropical trains.”

“Like mountains,” Spike says. It comes out almost reverently, and he shakes his head. “You've been walking through the mud.” Then he touches Xander's face because Xander is finally here, and the angles of the room right themselves, and he remembers how to talk to him.

They drink beer. Xander goes out to find himself something to eat, because Spike forgot about humans and their insistence on doing that. Spike hasn't eaten human food in a long time, and the pizza is strangely compelling.

“They always the toppings under the cheese here,” Xander says. “It's really weird.”

“It's good,” Spike says. He forgot about the taste of yeast and mushrooms, about the smell of overused ovens and the sweetness of burnt tomato sauce.

“It's not,” Xander says. “You used to have better taste in food than this.”

Spike had to talk to different people before he got on to Xander, and he'd been keeping to himself for such a long time so it was strange to talk to so many people. He gave different names, spoke to different women, and then suddenly Xander's voice was there at the end of the line, brittle and distracted, but Xander. Finally getting to that voice had taken a lot of concentration and Spike hadn't planned what he was going to say when he got there. At first he didn't know, thought it would all slip away from him, and then he found words, found himself. “Hello, pet,” he said down the phone line, and he heard Xander laugh, startled, heard a rustle of movement, a door shutting behind him.

Then Xander came here. They sat on the sofa. Spike doesn't think he sits on the sofa much, thinks he spends most of the time in bed. The telly's in the bedroom and there's a flotsam of books lying across the floor, paperbacks and little cloth bound volumes of poetry that he wouldn't show anyone. Rimbaud. Now there was a guy who knew what he was doing.

“Thought you forgot about me,” Xander says. “I heard you were alive.”

“Alive?” Spike says. “Not quite.” The he licks a line of tomato sauce off Xander's wrist, pretending it's blood. “I didn't forget.”

He hadn't forgotten what it was like to kiss Xander either, the urgent heat of that human mouth. That wasn't the sort of thing he was likely to forget. When he licks Xander's throat it tastes like bracken and gorse, reminds him of distant mountains he can't remember climbing, reminds him of standing in a high place with the sky all around, and the cries of night birds his only company.

 **Pearls**

Where was he? Spike remembers as much as he forgets. His hands smelt like Buffy for so long, but now they don't smell like anything. Hurt the girl. He hurt the girls. It's dark in here, dark and he should be able to penetrate it with his vampire eyes but he can't seem to see anything. Maybe he's gone blind. He puts his hands up to his face, presses down on his eye sockets and imagines his eyes rolling out of them, like pearls from a snapped string.

Dru liked to pretend she could knit. Purl and plain, purl and plain, purl and plain. She couldn't really knit, though Spike had watched his mother do it so often he thought he could have made sense of the tangle of wool and needles if only he'd tried hard enough. He can't knit now: he's blind, and there's something in his hair. He doesn't want to touch his head because he doesn't want to know what's in here. It might be maggots and they might be chomping away at him, chewing through bone. They might be maggots and he doesn't want to know.

He shouldn't be scared to be alone in the dark like this. He doesn't smell Buffy, he doesn't smell the girl on his hands, or anywhere, and he doesn't smell the rush of bodies either, the smell and sound of so many people. It's quiet and there's something like lemons in their air. Lemons. Maybe someone was trying to kill the maggots? He shouldn't be afraid of the dark.

He puts his hands to his head. His hair's clean and somehow that's worse. He knows what he's afraid of now. A girl comes swimming up to him through the silence, a girl with eyes as empty as his own and a hole in her stomach where her womb should be. “What's my name?” she says. “I don't remember.”

“I hurt the girl,” Spike says. He says it once, and then he says it again, and then he shouts it, scratching at his chest, scratching, scratching. Eventually you feel the dampness of the blood, eventually you feel the skin rip, the skin slide between your fingers, and you smell the cold blood. Scratch, scratch, like the maggots gnawing at his flesh, like mice nibbling at bags of bread.

Hands on his own, and he opens his eyes. The hands are so warm they burn him, and there's a line of light around the door. He's in his room, he's in a cupboard and it smells like lemons.

“You're the worst room-mate in the world,” Xander says and holds Spike's hands in his own. Spike knows where he is now, knows that his chest will stop hurting soon, knows that for now there will be no maggots and no girls, but he doesn't move. Xander holds his hands away from his chest and squats down in front of him.

“You are the very worst,” he says, squeezing Spike's fingers, and Spike doesn't move so Xander will keep holding on.

 **Linen**

They haven't had sex before. Xander smells musky, sweaty, human, and his cock is impossibly warm. It's awkward. They keep getting the angles wrong, and Spike still find it hard to hold on to where he is, and Xander's mouth on his cock is too dry somehow and Spike feels strangely exposed even under the sheets, and part of him wishes they didn't do this, they just say neatly in the living room and kissed, but afterwards the whole bed smells like sex and Xander and he wants to wallow in it, and Xander is blushing and warm and Spike rolls against him and breaths him in.

It's completely dark by five in December in Scotland, so they go out afterwards and Xander wraps up in gloves and coats, and walks through the Meadows, grass covered in old frost crunching under their feet. Spike doesn't go out much lately, doesn't know anyone in Edinburgh, can't be bothered with anything but the walls of his flat and looking at his phone. Going out makes him think too much of hunting, of how he used to follow the scents of certain people for hours. Just the right sort of scents.

Xander insists on buying hot chocolate in a Caffè Nero, and Spike stands awkwardly by the door, breathing in warm milk and sugar and coffee and feeling entirely out of place in the warm human room. He can smell the chocolate on Xander's breath and when he kisses him later it's so sweet it's almost unpleasant. It's the first time they've kissed since they had sex, and it feels the same as it did before. Spike knew it would, but it's still nice to be reassured.

It's too cold for the human to be comfortable outside for long, and Spike doesn't want to sit in a restaurant and watch him eat, so Xander buys himself a take-away and they sit in the flat together.

“You can't see the stars here,” Xander says. “There are too many lights. You can at the castle. You should visit, you know.”

“Buffy knows I'm here?” Spike says.

“She knows,” Xander says. “But she has other things on her mind.”

“I know,” Spike says. “So do I.”

He looks out the window, and for a second imagines walking up a steep path to some improbable castle somewhere near the Cairngorms, with Xander's hand in his. “I'd rather stay here,” Spike says.

“OK,” Xander says. He stretches and settles next to Spike on the sofa. He rests his head on Spike's shoulder. The weight is familiar. Comforting. “Isn't it funny,” Xander says, “That we didn't die?”

For once Spike doesn't contradict him, doesn't remind him that he is dead, that he's been dead for longer than Xander's been alive; he doesn't because for once, Spike feels very much alive and sitting here sharing this evening with Xander feels nothing less than miraculous.

 **Closed until further notice**

So they're probably going to die. They don't talk about it, but they decide to leave the house together, and walk briskly through the streets, not speaking but companionable. The cemetery doesn't feel remotely threatening any more. The demons have cleared out, and the final fight, the final kick that will burst the skull will not come yet. It is waiting.

They sit side by side, propped against a grave stone. _Sarah Margaret Porter, August 1910—February 1957_. No other words. Not a rich family. Deaths too common on the Hellmouth. Spike has lived through 1910 and 1957 but he doesn't remember much about either of them. Xander sighs and rests his head against Spike's shoulder, a warm, familiar weight.

“Tired?” Spike says. “Your eye OK?”

“Yeah, it doesn't really effect walking. I mean, it does, but it just makes walking more uncoordinated. It doesn't make it hurt or anything,” Xander says. He plucks at his sleeve, at his jeans. The sleeve seems so permanent, so unlikely to disappear, but Spike knows it could be gone in a moment, that one day he will not remember this sleeve, or the smell of Xander's body next to him. “So we're probably going to die,” Xander says.

“I'm already dead,” Spike says, because lately he feels it. Not undead, not anything but dead, simply dead, empty, cold.

“Yeah,” Xander says. “I feel like we should do something. Have sex. Let off fireworks. Rewatch _Pulp Fiction_.”

“We could do those things.”

“I'm pretty tired. I think I might fall asleep, and there's nothing more pathetic than falling asleep during _Pulp Fiction_.”

Spike finds Xander's hand. They've kissed twice, fallen asleep together four times, and touched each other like this, casually, inevitably, so often Spike has lost count. He doesn't know what to call it, this time he spends with Xander, other than time spent with Xander. Xander's hand is so warm Spike imagines it's like flames licking his palm. It soothes him.

“I've forgotten a lot of things,” Spike says. “When you live for a long time you forget a lot of things.”

“Like what?” Xander says. He shifts slightly closer to Spike.

“I dunno, do I? Then I'd remember.” Spike pauses. Exhales air that does not need to be in his lungs. “How cold do I feel to you?”

“Sort of room temperature,” Xander says.

“Lucky we live in California,” Spike says. “You wouldn't want to hold my hand in the snow.”

“Who says?” Xander says. “Maybe I want to risk frostbite. Take chances. Be edgy. It would go with my cool new eye patch.”

Spike laughs. Squeezes Xander's fingers slightly. Says, “I remember things, but I don't know the context. I don't know how I got there. That's how I know I forget. And I don't know where I was in 1957, or in 1910.”

“Probably nothing interesting happened then,” Xander says.

“Probably not,” Spike says. A lot of years seem dull to him now, now that he's lost the urge to fight, to hear bones breaking, to wallow in blood. The air is still around them, and there's a sickle moon. Xander curls against him, around him, nestling his head on Spike's chest. Spike strokes the curve of his warm human spine. Spike doesn't think he's ever held anyone quite like this before, doesn't think he's ever been close to anyone quite like this. He breathes in Xander's scent, relishes the shape of him curled against his body.

A long times passes. Spike says, at last, “I'll forget a lot of things. But not you.”

Xander doesn't say anything, but his hand finds Spike's and the fingers against Spike's palm are hot as flames.


End file.
